Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop: Curves

I'm going to concentrate on what I considered to be the most important tonal adjustments in just in case you're not used to using that word anytime I say tonal adjustments all it means is not color adjustments instead these air adjustments that affect the brightness for the contrast of your image after this we'll get into color adjustments so I find that there are two adjustments that I concentrate on when it comes to tonal adjustments in fact there's one that I used ninety five percent of the time in on ly five percent of the time well that one tool not quite do the job in therefore I have to have an alternative in those cases in that particular tool it is curves curren's is not the easiest thing to learn on your own so you need help to get started but once you get started you get practice you will not want to use anything else other than curves in camera when it comes to your tonal adjustments so we're going to take a look now just so you know if you ever need to access the same adju...

stments that we had in came a raw but you already have your picture all the way open into photo shop like you just finished stitching a panorama for instance were you have ah I don't know anything where for some reason it's in photo shop maybe you're doing some retouching to it or something else and you want to access what was in camera know that a newer versions of photo shop if you go to the filter menu you we're gonna have the choice of camera filter and you'll be able to get to the majority of the features that are usually found in camera here there'll be some things that aren't in there like the crop tool because it would be odd to crop your picture by applying a filter because filters don't usually change the dimensions of your picture you know so there are some things that just are taken out but if you ever need it head in there and it's really nice it's all this stuff in one dialogue box so it's very quick to be able to do things but there are some things that camera rogers isn't capable of and when I run into one of those limitations something I really need to refine mohr so than that curves is where I'm often going ahead I think of curves is the most powerful adjustment in all of photoshopped bar none by far exclamation point period I mean it's uh but it's also an adjustment that is not necessarily a common one when it comes to the average photo shop user because it's not easy to learn on your own but I'll guide you through it and I'm going to relate it to things you already know and I think if we do that and I show you enough examples you can start getting a little bit comfortable with with curves and then all you need is practise to really get it teo to become subconscious instead of where you actively have to think about it but I think it's really gonna be worth it because you're going to be able to do so much more with your images compared to any other adjustment that it will be crazy so I would say of the images that I opened that get all the way into photo shop I'm guessing eighty percent of them get curve supplied and if you look at my fine art images where I really refined my images to a point where there's nothing that I don't like about it I mean not a pixel I don't like about it I might have ten or twelve curves adjustment layers in that image to fine tune it and if you ever see images that are used for advertising and you actually see the files that have been adjusted usually they've been tweaked extensively every little item you'll find curves adjustment layers so much in there it's ridiculous so it's the thing to really get to know so let's take a look here I have a slide show I'm going to use it's just a fish photoshopped file that have separate layers for the slides I want to show you that the reason why I'm doing it that way is because then I can pop into curves right when I'm in this slide show and use it as I want to but just so you know if you look at my layers panel all this is is a bunch of layers and I'm viewing one layer at a time there happens to be a keyboard shortcut that on lee works if you have one layer visible and it happens to be the layer that's active if you want to use it it's option which is all time windows in the brackets and if I use it I can quickly cycle through my layers that's all I'm doing but let's take a look so curves the core concept of curves is that if you can understand how to use one of these you can understand how to use curves so hopefully you have one of these in your home it's a dimmer switch case you can't tell in russia they got knobs so there it was a little bit harder to teach curves but so this is actually a little bit more like brightness and contrast that adjustment because we would only have one control for brightness moving up to brighton down to darken curves is actually more like walking into your kitchen where you might actually have a bank a dimmer switch if you actually walk into your kitchen and you find the bank of dimmer switches they're not usually labeled but mentally you get used to him and and remember if maybe if you go to a dorm room or there's always new people they might label him in curves does the same thing at labels the dimmer switches but instead of controlling various parts of a room it's going to control various brightness levels in your picture and it's actually going to be labeled down at the bottom just like this is where the dimmer switch on the left would control things that used to be black that one on the far right will control things that used to be white and then you got the shades in between the only difference is we're not gonna have just five dimmers we can have more control in just five but before we get into that it doesn't make sense that are dimmer switches would start out the way we are right now because with black should you be able to move the slider down if something's already black what would happen if you use less light than blackness it doesn't make sense so the one for black shouldn't start off at the bottom so the only thing we could possibly do to black his ad light to it so that's how it's going to be also white doesn't make sense there to have it in the middle if white is the brightest weaken have the only thing we should be able to do to it is less than the amount of light that's they're so shouldn't that dimmer start off up there and those shades that air in between they wouldn't use the same amount of light wouldn't they vary in how much light is used so it just progressively gets to be maurin mohr and mohr light as we had to brighter and brighter shades if this makes sense to you right now you're completely understanding curves because that's the exact concept of curse the only difference is we're not limited to five dimmers we have two hundred and fifty six which sounds like you'd be ridiculous to adjust but it's not so if we look at that just remember that this is progressively going up his we get towards the right in above white it's at the top because you're using as much light as you can to begin with there and above black it's at the bottom because you start off with no light or it's black right so here's curves it doesn't quite look like a set of dimmer switches but it's exactly the same thing if you look down the bottom these of the brightness levels you might have within your picture this diagonal line tells you how much light you'd be using to create those brightness levels to begin with if he hadn't messed with him yet so black has no light in it whatsoever that's why it's at the bottom white has much lives you could possibly use it's at the top this is like a bank of dimmer switches the only difference is we have so many of them that they don't look like dimmer switches anymore but they act exactly like dimmer switches so with a curve if you ever push a curve up you're adding light and you're going to brighten your picture just like a dimmer switch if you ever move the curve down you're going to take away light you're going dark in your image just like a dimmer switch just like a dimmer switch if you move the curve the tiniest bit up you're going to make the tiniest change move it up a huge amount and you're going to make a huge stage just like a dimmer so you're going to end up clicking and dragging on here when you click you're going a little point on the curve and then you'll move that up or down and it'll move the curve that is to the right and the left of that so you don't have to deal with the two hundred fifty six individual dimmer switches instead the stuff nearby moves along with whatever you've clicked and dragged so in this case I clicked and drag straight up here to brighten something I click somewhere else drags straight down to dark and something else but in order to truly figure out what is going on I always need to compare the curve to what we started with because in a room would you know what was been done to the lighting unless he knew where the dimmer started before they made the change now you'd have to look at you know where they change so remember the original curve and imagine you could see the original curve at the same time as whatever it is you doing curves in this case I'll put a pencil in to represent it now if these were dimmer switches in order brighton something wouldn't you need to move a dimmer up so look at where the curve is above the pencil those of the areas where you're brightening the picture the father the curve deviates from where it started the brighter your making something so right here we're barely brightening the image at all right here same thing barely brighton innit but here were making a huge change because that dimmer got moved up way high what part of the image is changing we'll look down here at the bottom so things that used to be this bright got the teeniest bit brighter because the curve got moved up a little bit above it shades that were used to be this bright also got bright in the tiniest bit but the shades that air right about in here if he looks straight up where the dimmer switches for that we used to have this much light in there but now we've pushed away the heck up there you're not going to completely understand this by looking at it like this we gotta work on pick but if you get to some of the concept here then when we get on to the pictures it will be much easier to see what's going on so over here is where we're darkening because we're using less light than what we started with the diagonal line is where we started now it looks kind of weird to hold a pencil or pen up to your screen there represent the original so down the bottom there is this little icon and if you click on it it will expand curves and give you more options and one of the choices within there is something called baseline and the only thing baseline does is it leaves a copy of the original line in there just like the pencil represented and so when baseline is turn on you just see the original line and then the curve you've made so it's useful to have that turned on and I think it's on by default but if it ever gets turned off on you that's how you do it and just so you know this is the curves dialog box he would get if he went to the image menu they chose adjustments to get the curves if instead you made an adjustment layer this would look slightly different that's what we'll be using in a little while in these options that would be found in the side menu because the space you have a smaller but eric so now if you look at the area that is above that original line or below that original line that's where you're making your changes so here where we're below the original line we're using less light that's where things were getting darker here we're above we're making things brighter all right then if we click down here we have another choice called history ram because just because we could have all these brightness levels in our picture doesn't mean they're actually in there if you actually want to see which of these brightness levels are actually used within your picture you can click on that symbol down the bottom again and there's a choice called hissed a gram and it would just tell you hey you don't have any black because there's no bar chart above the black you have this stuff and you got none of that some people find the history I'm to be overly useful others ignore it but that's where you can toggle it on and off if you like it use it if you find it to make it to complex just cluttered looking turnoff so we get her dimmer switch you could if you wanted to you know if you had a russian friend that moved into the neighborhood he's used to knobs not used to the up and down thing you could help him out but little thing there tow you know I would be if you put that there was a preview of what do you get if you move that to a different height right so if you move it all the way at the top uses much light as you possibly can you get white wood all the way to the bottom used no light whatsoever you get black that might help him out to say hey this is what you're going to get if you move it to a certain height makes sense sounds kind of ridiculous but it makes sense well don't we put it in that's what the bar on the left is the bar on the left simply previews how bright will something become if you move it to a particular height so for instance when this got moved way up here well how bright is that just glance the left it's that bright and if it were removed up even higher to hear become that right so that's all the bar on the left is is a preview of how bright is something gonna get if you move it to various heights and it's exactly like having that little thing on the side of a denver if you're saying that you moved up here that's what you're gonna get does not make any sense you don't have to completely understand that most of the time you completely ignore that bar you just look at your picture and you see it naturally getting brighter and darker and who cares about the bar on the left but they put it in so I figured I'd describe what it does all right so there's her you'd be looking to the left now what part of the image is becoming that right that's always at the bottom so that means go straight down here that part is what we used to have it's dimmer got moved up this high which makes it that right now if you care about thinking about all that stuff all the time I usually don't instead I just look at my picture I see it getting brighter I see it getting darker and I don't have to think about it but if you're one of those that likes to think about it you could click down here there's a choice called intersection line and if you turn that on any time your moving one of these points and on lee when you're moving one of the points you would see two extra lines let me try to clean that up a little bit I'll get rid of the grid you can't actually turn the grid off I retouched it out all it would do intersection line would add these two extra lines in all those two lines do is that he followed this line down this says what are you changing and the one going to the left says and you're changing it to become this that's what it does I find it to look too busy with those things in there and I'm just looking at my picture when I'm doing this but just so you know what it does if you ever find it's turned on and it looks too cluttered because you see it with the grid and there as well and he just got a lot of stuff that's how you turn off intersection line all right enough of that let your brain just kind of go through and let's adjust pictures okay let's start adjusting pictures this is when it starts to make a little bit more sense and you've just got to refer back to some of those concepts in order to be able to really you know get what's going on now a lot of the things I'm going to do here could be done with some other adjustments like levels brightness and contrast or something else but in general the way photo shop works is there's a progression in how much control you get as you get to more sophisticated adjustments and part of the way it works is the simplest adjustment in general is called brightness and contrast it just has to slaughters and then to press up from that usually learn next how to use levels and then you progress from that to curves but as you progress up whatever it is you progress too do all the things that those other things could do as you get to more and more sophisticated stuff you could do everything the simpler stuff does in a heck of a lot more so if I do anything here that you're used to doing with levels or you're used to doing with brightness and contract that's fine this is just a substitute for it but now I'll be able to do a heck of a lot more addition and so you can either use curbs as a complete and total replacement for brightness and contrast levels in other adjustments or you can use it just win whatever adjustment you're most comfortable with fails you and it's not capable of doing something then you're like fine I'm going to go to curves because they could do it all makes sense all right so here I'm in a temple in southeast asia I'm looking out through this opening that I found and I just like the design of this thing I don't if it's a ventra what you know but what I don't like is that in the distance I can see some of the stuff that's outside and I think it's making it too busy I like the simplicity of just the design that's there and I would like the areas that are out there too be white so I'm gonna apply curves now on this particular image I would usually use adjustment layers for everything I do always but in this particular case I'm not going to simply because remember wearing a slideshow that's made out of a bunch of layers my layers pal it looks pretty complicated and so I'm going to instead be going up here to get to curves just because then we don't have to be looking at my layers panel because it's already complicated over there and I'll be getting to curves by typing its keyboard shortcut command m curves used to be called arbitrary map if david being me is out there he told me that the other day and that's why the am is there for map bored just think of maryland she's curvy marilyn monroe so I'm gonna be typing command them it's gonna pop up curves for me but usually I'd use an adjustment layer and we'll do that once we get into individual images instead of the slide show so command them and I'm gonna turn off some of these check boxes just to simplify things I don't like that air section line history am I don't think we're gonna need and all that was that all right so now if you look at this the area where I want the detail to turn white is in the bright portion of the picture correct so if you look at this bar the bottom these there all the things we could change over here is the bright portion and I would like to force those areas toe white so if I had dimmer switches that were to control this portion of my picture would I not want to push him all the way to the top use as much light as possible to make them white does that make sense there's a couple different ways I could do that one is I could visually ge estimate I'd look over here and say well I think that brightness ranges over here and I could just click on the curve and push it to the top and you see how a lot of that just went away because we have brightened up and we got that part to go all the way the top that's one way to get rid of a dot you've already added to your curve just pull it off the grid just click on it pull it beyond the edge of the grid it goes away but there are other things I could do in here do you see this little slider here if you're used to using levels by chance a lot of people are this slider is the same as a slider and levels that would be in the upper right of levels and what it does is it forces areas toe white if you simply look at what it does to the curve you can figure it out when I pull this over do you see what it's doing to my car all it's doing is making things white if you move that dimmer switch all the way the top you get white right and what's it doing where is things becoming white well all these shades right here it's everything that is to the right of this slaughter turns white it's just making it easy to work with the curve where you don't have to have a dot so I could pull that over and just look at my picture go until I get most of that detail go away but then if I turn preview off and I see before and after before after look how bright everything became maybe I don't want everything to become that bright well I could then take the rest of the curve in fact I could turn preview often just look at how bright this wass try to find that brightness down here somewhere I'm guessing maybe over in here I'm just gassing and some people are better at guessing than others so you might be more precise thing say no I'm wrong but if that's the case let's say it was this bright I go straight up there's where the dimmer switches for that and if you didn't want to change the dimmer switch in a room but somebody bumped it wouldn't you just put it back to where it used to be same thing here if I didn't want the brightness of that area to change I just grabbed the dimmer switch and put it back to where it used to be you see the diagonal line that's where it used to be so just dragged this straight down to the diagonal line and we can get it to get close to back to where it used to be if I didn't guess right at the brightness I might have to have just fine tune that a little okay let's see if I'm anywhere close look it's still a little bit bright but I could find to knit I'll show you to be more precise as we progress all right on this image we don't have much contrast there's not really dark stuff anywhere so let's go to curves and in this case it looks like I got the history ram in there I can see the width of the history ram it tells me which brightness levels aaron my picture and I can tell that I don't have anything darker than right here because if I did then there'd have to be bar chart information over here and there just isn't so I want the darkest part of the picture to become black and if I grabbed this slider that's all this cider does it moves thie curve all the way to the bottom and if using dimmer switches all the way to the bottom means no light whatsoever during the lights off and so I'm going to pull this over until it touches the bar chart like that what did I just do I took everything that used to be in this brightness range if there was anything in my picture of that brightness which there wasn't it made it black in that brought it all way over to there which made the darkest part of my picture black does that make any sense that slider is exactly the same is the upper left slider in levels yeah for left slider and levels forces things too black as you bring in what we got it right here in curves it's just is easy you to use their just two sliders there now the brightest part of this picture do we have any white he just close but just a little less bit off so I could pull this in until the tip of this thing touches right there and if so the brightest part of the picture would become white like that then there's a whole bunch of things I could do this but we don't know how yet because we haven't talked about it yet so for now we're going to say that's good enough I'll choose undo here's before here's after now that is a change that could have been done in levels because he had the same two sliders and level so the upper to but you'd be limited in what you could do with the rest of the image if you were in levels where in curves I could do all sorts of other things here's an image where this is part of a gate and this is a shadow for the gate falling on a wall uh and I would like to make this shadow black so let's go to curves and in curves instead of guessing at where things are on the curve where I say look at how bright this is and find it down here to look at it's dimmer switch do you see little hand tooled right there if I tap that now when I move my mouse on top of the image you see a circle on my curve of that circle all it does is when I hover over my picture without clicking is it shows me how much light is in the area or my mom or my mouse's if the circles all the way at the top whatever area my mouse is on his wife it's got us much light as he could if it's all the way to the bottom it's got black in there but in this case it's somewhere in between sit right there now what I really wish I could do it's just have a dimmer switch that controls that brightness level in my picture I could do exactly that by moving my mouse on top of the area I'm thinking of adjusting and just click it just added a point to my curve and now it's exactly like having a dimmer switch in my hand so that means if I moved my mouse up right now I'm gonna add light in brighton for some of my miles down right now I'm going to take away light in darkness hey so I could move this up I'm just clicking on picture right now dragon straight up or down I'm just going to bring this straight down now the other dimmer switches move along with it so it looks like a smooth transition into those so it's not just that that's changing but I can control exactly how dark that shadow is hi then let's say the wall where the shadow is not showing up is getting too dark we'll just move your mouse on top of it and you see the circle that appears that's how much light is in it click if you want to change it and then just drag up toe add more light to it and if you get it right back to where you started right now am I not right where we started a ce faras the diagonal lines concerned it should be the same brightness it used to be so I'm going to turn preview ofthe before and after you see what I did to my shadow my wall but got more saturated but it's approximately the same color are not same color same brightness huh so you can see how you're starting to get a little bit more control the problem is if you're used to using levels which I find a lot of people are because levels is pretty relatively easy to understand when somebody shows you the problem is every single slider in all of levels affects your entire picture I can't move a slider in levels in prevent one particular shade from changing in curves I can easily do it just at a dot for whatever area you don't want to change and never moved the dot would you d'oh you just locked in the brightness of that area because it's dimmer switch never changed so it's much more powerful and there that's why I'm not showing you levels first because kirsten do everything levels khun dio and I think it's worth spending time to learn it so let's look at more we got our curve one concept with curves is if you look at the areas they're getting steeper than they used to be remember that used to be is the diagonal line in there anything getting steeper mohr towards vertical in this case there's two spots like that is where you're getting more contrast in whenever you get more contrast it's easier to see detail so in this image this is the badlands of south dakota if you look at this thing I don't want to call it a mountain or what you don't know what they're called but a wall of of stuff do you see a slight variation in brightness I can see this area what she looks maybe the tiniest bit redder and darker and then the area above it which a little paler and lighter I want to make it easier to see that detail this could just as easily be let's say a wooden door and there's wood grain in it and the wood grain you khun barely perceive because the dark little part of the grain is almost the same brightness is the light part of the base color of the door and you want to exaggerate ma'am pop out well all you gotta do is make a greater difference between the two and brightness so let's go to curves what's click on that hand so we don't have to guess about anything and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna come in here in first click up here on the light area click and just let go if you click and let go on something you're locking in the brightness of it you're saying I'm establishing a dimmer switch for this but I'm not moving it so there's a dimmer sitting there just holding out the brightness of this area then you go to the other area which happens to be a bit darker and you click and then if I dragged up I'd brighten but I want it darkens I'm gonna drag down and you may see it's easier and easier to see the detail it's in there try doing that with levels you're going to make the entire picture brighter entire picture darker and I wouldn't be able to do things like go back to the sky which is getting a little brighter and so I don't want this guy to change we'll just click on the sky bring it back to where it used to be that kind of stuff by the clouds so that's uh needs to be brighter fine bringing brighter describe a dimmer move it you can't do that with levels levels it's like a it's like a tricycle training wheels I added to it it's like a I can't stand it it's like so basic it's you can't get true real quality unless you get into something more sophisticated but it's where people go because they're comfortable I was comfortable there from decades well for a decade before he really got into this so let's try that again same moments just command them for curves you gotta click the hand so it knows when you click on very much to do something related to curves usually if you want to pull out detail what you want to do is add two dots one of the brightest area of the surface you're thinking of one of the darkest area of the same surface so that means I'm going to click up here where it's bright and I'm gonna click down over here where it's dark and make it steeper between the two three ways to do that I could move the upper dot hire the lower dot lower or do both how do I decide well they're dimmer switches so moving the upper dot up is going toe brightness now so look at the picture does it need to be brighter if so do that moving the lower dot lower is going to darken so look at the picture what do you think it would look ok if it got darker if so do that and if you're not sure maybe do both so let's pull this one straight down I could do it on the curve itself and let's pull the other one straight up you see in a greater difference between those areas we can pull out detail in all sorts of things with that now once we talkabout adjustment layers which we'll get to know by the end of the day you're going to be able to limit this where it just would not affect the sky whatsoever would not affect the grass whatsoever by simply painting across them to say don't affect this and that's when curves becomes so much more useful but first we got to get the basics down so to bring out detail look at whatever surface you want to bring out detail in this room leather sofas I see these little all the grain and stuff in it so I want that to really be pronounced I click on a bright part and I click on a dark part and I make it steeper between the two uh so then let's do the opposite so if making the curve steeper more towards vertical exaggerate detail makes it easier to see then the opposite of making it's steeper would be making it flatter more towards horizontal and in this curve which is just an example curve there's two spots where it's getting flatter it's always compared to the original doesn't have to be flat it just needs to be at all flat earth in the original line well here I have a sculpture captured this sculpture in moscow and I like the overall shape of it just so you know the sculpture does have a head just I captured at an angle where you couldn't see the head so that's kind of weird but in their honor if you concede or not not hook don't know how good the video feed is what comes to shadow detail but I can see detail in it and I would rather not so I'm gonna go to curves and I'm going to do the same idea of adding a dot on the brightest part and add dot on the darkest part of the sculpture I'm not exactly sure where that is I'm going to guess but I'll grab the hand tool and for the main part of the sculpture I'm guessing the bright part is probably going to be down here nearest near his foot or there's little highlight right about there I think click then I'm going to go for the dark area I'm not gonna be exactly sure but I'm just gonna guess to mate maybe there and then if I want to make it harder to see detail all I need to do is move these two dimmer switches so they're at almost identical heights wouldn't that make it the same amount of light in both spots and across the area in between the two you don't have to bring it all the way to exactly the same height that would be no detail whatsoever I just might want to make it harder to see the detail so which one of the two tow I move well in order to get him to the same height this one would need to be moved down with that if it's dimmer that's going to darken so do I want to darken the picture or not that would be my question otherwise I could move this dot up to the same height as this one that's going to brighten things because the dimmer switch you're moving it up I'd look at the images say do I want to brighten it and in this case I don't think I want to brighten it so that means I'll be working with that upper dot and I'll just be pulling it down if I move left to right at all I'm doing it by accident just say no ben quick question yes can you hold down the shift key to constrain that from going left to right on the shift key no I cannot but if when you do it you're doing it by clicking on your picture instead of within curves it's on ly going move straight up and down it can't move left to right it's only when I'm manually going to the curve itself that I have to be careful not to swing left or right so if when I'd done this I had just clicked on the darkest part of the image toe lock in its brightness and then I went to the brightest part I could just start dragon right on the picture up and down and it's not going to shift on it's just going to be straight up or down it's when I move my mouth onto the curve itself that I need be careful not to shift it around so let's take a look here I'm gonna turn preview auf look at just the sculpture before I could see little highlights and things in here when I turn it back on it's much more difficult to see that detail not sky though it got pretty darn dark if I want to change it I move my mouth on top of the sky clicked at a dimmer switch for it and move up now it doesn't know there's a sky it's not targeting the sky all it knows is how bright it is and it says let's take everything in the entire picture that's this bright in bring it's dimmer switch up higher toe add light and I don't usually want to get back to what it used to look like I just wanted to look appropriate considering the new rest of the picture so if I turn this off and on the sky's a little darker but the main thing is with curves if you make the curve flatter it's going to be more difficult to see detail in an area in sometimes that's useful sometimes there's a you have the texture of stucco behind a person is distracting it's just your eye ghost the stucco so the person for some reason well go to the stucco and click on the bright part click on the dark part and make it a little bit doesn't have to be exactly the same brightness that would be no detail but make it so the dots are at similar heights not quite as different in height and it will be much harder to see the detail it's there and it will become less distracting and when we use adjustment layers we would be able to prevent it from applying to a person or something else but for now the curve this going tio we can only isolate things based on right this right out but as I make any sense is faras making it harder to see detail if you make two areas become exactly the same brightness then you can't tell the difference between the two whereas they used to vary so you used to be able to see the difference and that's what we're doing we're getting closer and closer to make him exactly the same practice now it curves you can on ly isolate an area based on brightness so in this case I look at this picture and I noticed the door is quite a bit different in brightness fromthe wall that surrounds it and if that's the case in curves I should be able to adjust the wall separate from the door if you look on the door can you see some markings there's like an ex near the right side of the door I want to make the markings that around the door and the contrast in the door be more pronounced easier to see the detail there but I don't want the wall to change very much that's my task so I'm gonna go to curves and the first thing I'm going to do is since I know I don't want to change the um the wall I'll click on the hand and I'm just gonna click out here in lecco to say added dimmer switch for the wall and I'm never going to move it so all that's going to do is lock it in if I didn't do that then it just might happen to move when I'm working with the rest of the curve but if I just click there back I don't if I clicked in the right spot get rid of that tried again okay I just click there and at least I locked it in so that it's only going to move if I move it question and that is that one pixel or can you control how much it's not it isthe usually thinking about one pixel but it's only thinking about brightness and so the thing it could mess up with us if that area was noisy if it had a lot of noise in it you might have accidentally clicked on a speck of noise and that would have sent you off a little bit but it's not usually going to be by much and it's so you can change the settings on your eyedropper tool in your tool panel two three by three average or five by five average there's a setting for it and that would cause this to average a little area when it analyzes the brightness but it's not usually an issue now I'm going to move my mouth over to the door and instead of trying to click on the brightest and darkest areas I don't know where those are so what I'm going to do is just drag across where I want the details the more pronounced and all I need to do is looking curves you see a circle jumping around well if I'm dragging across the area want to change wouldn't the highest point that that circle goes to be the brightest point because this talking about light and so the higher it is the brighter it iss and the lowest point would be the darkest so if I just drag across this area I look at where that circles jumping around it seems like it's just going nuts moving around I don't care how erratic it is moving around what I just cares what's the range it goes across so I just drag like this and I go where does it go across the majority of the time it's okay if it like for a millisecond pops out somewhere but where does it stay and spend most of its time when I drag across this I didn't mean it click I'm just hovering and I would say it went in general between about here and about there I think it might have deviated from that for a millisecond but it spends the majority of its time in between there so that's generally the brightness range that's in that area there might be a speck that's brighter respect that's darker but that's pretty close now I'm gonna make it steeper and I look at the door and I'm thinking the door could get a little darker so that means I'm gonna be moving things down to make it steeper gonna grab this dot move it straight down and let's see if it's becoming more pronounced where the door is ill turn preview auf is the door detail becoming more pronounced because there's a greater difference in bright nous between the bright and dark part of the door so it's easier to see that difference uh but let's look at the wall I'll turn preview off the walls not changing much there's a little bitty change in it and that's because when I clicked on the wall I added one dot didn't I but the wall varies and how bright it is and so if I were to move across the wall and see where its little circle goes that just means where's the brightness range that's in the wall it's varies a bit and if you get low enough it's starting deviate the tiniest bit so I can add another dot just pull it right over there get the entire range where the wall is to match where we started and then the wall wouldn't be changing at all but I can only do that if the door is different in brightness than the wall so down here at the bottom there are dark areas by the curb in those air probably the same brightness is the door in some areas so I bet you they changed he see those they got a little darker the bottom of that curb I can see it right down there but that's where if I used an adjustment layer I could just paint in a millisecond and prevent that from happening